History PopularityPolynomial / RealLife

* With the growth of social media and instant messaging, Internet Relay Chat looked poised to go the way of Website/{{Usenet}} in the '00s, a place for pirates and Website/FourChan trolls to hang out in. Instead, nearly every open source project has an IRC channel (typically on Freenode), as well as many [[Website/{{Reddit}} subreddits]].

*** Hair Metal, the ''other'' example of why the 80's were so lame, also saw a small but noticeable resurgence in popularity in the mid-00s.

** Disco. A great deal of popular music for the past two decades (especially between 2005 and 2011-12) has been essentially "Disco that Dared Not Speak Its Name". However, the ''word'' still has a ways to go. Thanks to bands like Music/DaftPunk and Music/LCDSoundsystem, it's on its way back.

* Throughout the last decades of the 20th century and especially after the start of the 21st, over-the-air (OTA) television and the traditional TV antennas used to receive it fell out of fashion in favor of cable and satellite TV, which offered a larger variety of programming, were less encumbered by content restrictions, and could produce shows with larger budgets thanks to the increased revenue from carriage and/or subscription fees. It got to the point where the most popular and talked-about TV shows were on cable stations, not major networks, and many newly built or renovated homes forwent the installation of TV antennas. In TheNewTens, however, public opinion, especially that of younger audiences, began to sour on cable and satellite, seeing them as obsolete and cumbersome services that force you to pay exorbitant amounts of money for hundreds or thousands of channels that you will only ever watch a handful of, comparing them unfavorably to newer Internet streaming services such as Creator/{{Netflix}}. Many of these people, or cord-cutters as they came to be known, supplement online streaming services with OTA TV in order to watch programming that can't be found easily online, such as local news and sports, sparking a revival of interest in the service, especially after the transition to digital offered "digital subchannels" and greater clarity due to the lack of signal compression on cable or satellite, as well as a lack of snow that you'd see on analog channels. While OTA TV may never return to being the dominant way of watching television like it was in the early days of TV, it is far from going extinct as many predicted.

** Conspicuous consumption, at least until 2005, then became unthinkable of after 2007. It resurfaced again in the mid-2010s as the economy began to recover, then the Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent economic collapse made it fall out of favor again.

* Throughout the last decades of the 20th century and especially after the start of the 21st, over-the-air (OTA) television and the traditional TV antennas used to receive it fell out of fashion in favor of cable and satellite TV, which offered a larger variety of programming and were less encumbered by content restrictions. It got to the point where the most popular and talked-about TV shows were on cable stations, not major networks, and many newly built or renovated homes forwent the installation of TV antennas. In TheNewTens, however, public opinion, especially that of younger audiences, began to sour on cable and satellite, seeing them as obsolete and cumbersome services that force you to pay exorbitant amounts of money for hundreds or thousands of channels that you will only ever watch a handful of, comparing them unfavorably to newer Internet streaming services such as Creator/{{Netflix}}. Many of these people, or cord-cutters as they came to be known, supplement online streaming services with OTA TV in order to watch programming that can't be found easily online, such as local news and sports, sparking a revival of interest in the service, especially after the transition to digital offered "digital subchannels" and greater clarity due to the lack of signal compression on cable or satellite, as well as a lack of snow that you'd see on analog channels. While OTA TV may never return to being the dominant way of watching television like it was in the early days of TV, it is far from going extinct as many predicted.

* The {{Fantasy}} genre hit a low point in the early-mid '10s where many movies of the fantasy kind were {{Box Office Bomb}}s, and it lost significant ground in overall popularity to the {{Superhero}} genre. There were exceptions, such as ''Franchise/HarryPotter'' due to its longstanding popularity and ''Series/GameOfThrones'' for being such a mature take on it, but overall the fear of failure was what kept many properties from being greenlit. In the late '10s, things changed. The rise of streaming (see above) has led to these concepts being perfect adaptations for the format, with their rich lore, LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters, detailed worlds, and possibilities for stories actually being ''ideal'' -- an interesting reversal in what kept these stories from succeeding to begin with. ''Literature/TheWheelOfTime'', ''Literature/TheChroniclesOfNarnia'', ''Franchise/TheWitcher'', and ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'', just to name a few, are examples of stories that were announced as major selling points for their services.

Then came the "retail apocalypse" since 2016 and amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020, where a disproportionately large number of popular mall stores went through large amounts of closings or gone out of business entirely, including major department store chain The Bon-Ton. Combined with frequent store closings from the three major department store chains (J.C. Penney, Macy's, and Sears), creating further holes to be filled in malls countrywide (although discount-oriented department stores, such as Kohl's, Burlington, and Marshalls/TJ Maxx, have thrived). At the same time, social media became the place to hang out rather than the local decaying mall, especially younger people. Despite these closures, many malls have worked around this by introducing more big-box stores; entertainment complexes (high-end theaters, bowling alleys, large-format arcades such as Dave & Buster's); unconventional tenants such as libraries, storefront churches, playplaces, or secondhand shops; or even non-retail use (one notable example being Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn, Michigan, which replaced a long-vacant department store with Ford offices). Even as the retail scene shifts, it appears that the American mall still has some life left in it.

** The 1980s themselves have been considered to be the last era of "true car design" in both the US and Europe as oil was no longer a concern and automakers now focused on innovative designs, leading to the spacecraft-like cars of the late 80s such as the Ford Taurus and the Citroen XM. However, TheNineties brought a focus on environmentalism and [[PoliticalCorrectnessGoneMad "blander" designs]] (as a result of the consolidation between American and European companies) that in the long run stripped cars from their personality. These claims became really popular by the second half of the 2000s (with the oil crisis and the car industry downturn) as these became relics of a better time for automobiles..

* Creator/AdamWest. In the late 1960s, he was a primetime TV star and the actor charged with bringing Series/Batman1966 back to life after being crippled by UsefulNotes/TheComicsCode. Head to the '80s and the return of the [[UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks Dark Knight]], and West is a ''persona non grata'', firmly stuck as a reminder of what was then seen as a DorkAge of Batman. This is lampshaded in an episode of ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'', in which a character based on and voiced by West is portrayed as a washed-up has-been matinee idol remembered only by hardcore fans. But toward the end of his life, he was a staple voice actor in comedies such as ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'' [[AdamWesting precisely because of his history as Batman]] and trademark [[LargeHam overdramatic voice]]. Adam West's particular incarnation of Batman has enjoyed repopularization via the light-hearted ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold'' and the comic book ''ComicBook/Batman66'', as well as a general reappraisal of the 60s series itself, with it being appreciated for the AffectionateParody that it is. All this led to West's death in 2017 causing much more public sadness than it likely would have a decade previously.

* TheSeventies. Throughout the '80s and '90s, this decade was seen as America's DorkAge. Since the late '90s, it's seen as a more innocent time. Elements from the '70s which have made comebacks since then include:

* TheEighties. In the '90s and even the '00s, ''this'' was seen as America's DorkAge. However, many of the fashions and styles of that decade have made a comeback, with the returning popularity of everything from ''Franchise/{{Transformers}}'' to leg warmers. Yes, ''leg warmers''.

* In Germany, train stations in major cities and the area surrounding them are this. Back in the 19th century when most cities were first connected to rail lines, train stations were impressive and expensive buildings in the center of town or the best neighborhoods. However, with the decline of rail travel, they entered a serious DorkAge and became associated with drug dealers, the homeless, urban blight and just general decay. Part of the reason for that also was that the state owned railway company did not care enough and/or lacked the resources to do something about that. But eventually, major train stations (e.g. Leipzig, Berlin, Hamburg) have once again become places where people spend a lot of time because they ''want'' to, not because they have to. Train stations now contain a lot of shops (which, due to some quirks in the law can open on Sundays which normal stores usually can't) and they are actually a huge money source for UsefulNotes/DeutscheBahn. One of the cities where the neighborhood around the train station is undergoing serious gentrification is Frankfurt. Once upon a time Frankfurt Bahnhofsviertel was synonymous with drugs, prostitution and crime. Now, it is one of the fastest gentrifying places in Germany. The prostitution still isn't gone however. Many young people don't even remember that train stations used to have a negative image. However, the situation for marginal stations in the countryside and minor cities is still dire and many have been replaced by nothing more than shacks.

* Bill Gates became famous for the BASIC programming language, and Microsoft's [[UsefulNotes/{{MSX}} operating]] [[UsefulNotes/MicrosoftWindows systems]]. Then he became the world's richest man, and Microsoft was a MegaCorp with questionable business practices and unreliable software such as certain UsefulNotes/MicrosoftWindows versions, and thus the general public thought of Gates as a CorruptCorporateExecutive. Then in 2000 two things happened that along the years improved Gates' reputation, his NumberTwo [[LargeHam Steve Ballmer]] become Microsoft CEO and thus face of the company, and the estabilishment of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's wealthiest charity organization. The high profile philantrophy ended the {{Demonization}}, and perception of Gates changed from an UpperClassTwit and cutthroat businessman to someone who wanted to make the world better. However, his popularity would take a major blow in 2021 when he announced that he and Melinda were getting divorced, with reports coming out shortly after that cited his attempts to form a connection with notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein as a major reason why. This, along with [[EatTheRich growing distrust of the mega-rich]] throughout UsefulNotes/TheNewTens and UsefulNotes/TheNewTwenties, led to further scrutiny of Gates, which revealed that many of his charitable activities were more self-serving than they appeared at first, and were seen by many as attempts to wrest control of issues such as public health and education from public hands into private ones. In particular, his opposition to waiving patents on vaccines for the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic also drew a lot of criticism, since many parts of the world, especially poorer countries, were struggling to obtain enough vaccines to inoculate their populations in time to curb the rapid spread of the virus.

* President UsefulNotes/UlyssesSGrant. When he left office, he was a well-liked president and much lauded as a general, credited with winning the Civil War for the Union. However, the scandals, as well as the economic downturn, that marred his second term quickly began to take their toll on his reputation. For a long time, even his military record was re-evaluated as nothing special, with Grant being credited more for being in the right place at the right time for good things to happen rather than any genuine military greatness on his own part. In the following decades, Grant's reputation has begun to recover, with modern Grant supporters pointing out that he had easily the best civil rights record of the Reconstruction presidents; Grant supported black Southerners (including undertaking a massive government crackdown on UsefulNotes/TheKlan that left them crippled for four decades) and made numerous, albeit largely unsuccessful, efforts to keep the peace between whites and Native Americans in the West. Though Grant is still generally ranked as a below-average president in scholarly sources, his reputation is steadily climbing, while that of traditionally lauded presidents with ''bad'' civil rights records (such as UsefulNotes/AndrewJackson and UsefulNotes/WoodrowWilson) has headed in the other direction.

* Bill Gates became famous for the BASIC programming language, and Microsoft's [[UsefulNotes/{{MSX}} operating]] [[UsefulNotes/MicrosoftWindows systems]]. Then he became the world's richest man, and Microsoft was a MegaCorp with questionable business practices and unreliable software such as certain UsefulNotes/MicrosoftWindows versions, and thus the general public thought of Gates as a CorruptCorporateExecutive. Then in 2000 two things happened that along the years improved Gates' reputation, his NumberTwo [[LargeHam Steve Ballmer]] become Microsoft CEO and thus face of the company, and the estabilishment of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's wealthiest charity organization. The high profile philantrophy ended the {{Demonization}}, and perception of Gates changed from an UpperClassTwit and cutthroat business man to someone who wanted to make the world better. However, his popularity would take a major blow in 2021 when he announced that he and Melinda were getting divorced, with reports coming out shortly after that cited his attempts to form a connection to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein as a major reason why. This, along with [[EatTheRich growing distrust of the mega-rich]] throughout UsefulNotes/TheNewTens and UsefulNotes/TheNewTwenties, led to further scrutiny of Gates, which revealed that many of his charitable activities were more self-serving than they appeared at first, and were seen by many as attempts to wrest control of issues such as public health and education from public hands into private ones. In particular, his opposition to waiving patents on vaccines for the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic also drew a lot of criticism, since many parts of the world, especially poorer countries, were struggling to obtain enough vaccines to inoculate their populations in time to curb the rapid spread of the virus.

* Throughout the last decades of the 20th century and especially after the start of the 21st, over-the-air (OTA) television and the traditional TV antennas used to receive it fell out of fashion in favor of cable and satellite TV, which offered a larger variety of programming and were less encumbered by content restrictions. It got to the point where the most popular and talked-about TV shows were on cable stations, not major networks, and many newly built or renovated homes forwent the installation of TV antennas. In TheNewTens, however, public opinion, especially that of younger audiences, began to sour on cable services, seeing them as obsolete and cumbersome services that force you to pay exorbitant amounts of money for hundreds or thousands of channels that you will only ever watch a handful of, comparing them unfavorably to newer Internet streaming services such as Creator/{{Netflix}}. Many of these people, or cord-cutters as they came to be known, supplement online streaming services with OTA TV in order to watch programming that can't be found easily online, such as local news and sports, sparking a revival of interest in the service, especially after the transition to digital offered "digital subchannels" and greater clarity due to the lack of signal compression on cable or satellite, as well as a lack of snow that you'd see on analog channels. While OTA TV may never return to being the dominant way of watching television like it was in the early days of TV, it is far from going extinct as many predicted.

** Fear of nuclear war became widespread again with U.S. President Creator/DonaldTrump and North Korean dictator Kim-Jong Un exchanging threats throughout 2017, although this has mostly cooled off after both leaders' summit in 2018 and Trump leaving office in 2021, but this fear resurfaced in 2022 amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

* Throughout the last decades of the 20th century and especially after the start of the 21st, over-the-air (OTA) television and the traditional TV antennas used to receive it fell out of fashion in favor of cable and satellite TV, which offered a larger variety of programming and were less encumbered by content restrictions. It got to the point where the most popular and talked-about TV shows were on cable stations, not major networks, and many newly built or renovated homes forwent the installation of TV antennas. In TheNewTens, however, public opinion, especially that of younger audiences, began to sour on cable services, seeing them as obsolete and cumbersome services since they force you to pay exorbitant amounts for hundreds or thousands of channels that you will only ever watch a handful of, comparing them unfavorably to newer Internet streaming services such as Creator/{{Netflix}}. Many of these people, or cord-cutters as they came to be known, supplement online streaming services with OTA TV in order to watch programming that can't be found easily online, such as local news and sports, sparking a revival of interest in the service, especially after the transition to digital offered "digital subchannels" and greater clarity due to the lack of signal compression on cable or satellite, as well as a lack of snow that you'd see on analog channels. While OTA TV may never return to being the dominant way of watching television like it was in the early days of TV, it is far from going extinct as many predicted.

* Throughout the last decades of the 20th century and especially after the start of the 21st, over-the-air (OTA) television and the traditional TV antennas used to receive it fell out of fashion in favor of cable and satellite TV, which offered a larger variety of programming and was less encumbered by content restrictions. It got to the point where the most popular and talked-about TV shows were on cable stations, not major networks, and many newly built or renovated homes forwent the installation of TV antennas. In TheNewTens, however, public opinion, especially that of younger audiences, began to sour on cable services, seeing them as obsolete and cumbersome services since they force you to pay exorbitant amounts for hundreds or thousands of channels that you will only ever watch a handful of, comparing them unfavorably to newer Internet streaming services such as Creator/{{Netflix}}. Many of these people, or cord-cutters as they came to be known, supplement online streaming services with OTA TV in order to watch programming that can't be found easily online, such as local news and sports, sparking a revival of interest in the service, especially after the transition to digital offered "digital subchannels" and greater clarity due to the lack of signal compression on cable or satellite, as well as a lack of snow that you'd see on analog channels. While OTA TV may never return to being the dominant way of watching television like it was in the early days of TV, it is far from going extinct as many predicted.

* Glass bottles. Up until the 1980s, milk and other drinks were always found in glass bottles but beginning in the 1970s, plastic became the norm... until the 2010s when the environmental effects of plastic became well-known. By the second half of the decade, glass bottles saw a resurgence. In many countries the introduction of (sometimes intentionally onerous) deposits for plastic bottles, the increasing refusal of recycling plants to handle plastic and even a "sin tax" helped repopularize glass bottles. Despite appearances even "durable" PET bottles last less cycles of being used, emptied and refilled than glass bottles.

Then came the "retail apocalypse" of 2016-19, where a disproportionately large number of popular mall stores went through large amounts of closings or gone out of business entirely, including major department store chain The Bon-Ton. Combined with frequent store closings from the three major department store chains (J.C. Penney, Macy's, and Sears), creating further holes to be filled in malls countrywide (although discount-oriented department stores, such as Kohl's, Burlington, and Marshalls/TJ Maxx, have thrived). At the same time, social media became the place to hang out rather than the local decaying mall, especially younger people. Despite these closures, many malls have worked around this by introducing more big-box stores; entertainment complexes (high-end theaters, bowling alleys, large-format arcades such as Dave & Buster's); unconventional tenants such as libraries, storefront churches, playplaces, or secondhand shops; or even non-retail use (one notable example being Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn, Michigan, which replaced a long-vacant department store with Ford offices). Even as the retail scene shifts, it appears that the American mall still has some life left in it.

** Streetcars (or Trams for the British). After UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, a combination of cheap gas and the growing popularity of buses (and, according to {{conspiracy theorist}}s, some [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal underhanded tactics]] by the auto industry) led to many streetcar lines falling out of use and eventually being dismantled. The few surviving ones in the West (in East Germany and most other Warsaw Pact nations this was not the case for complex reasons, among them the [[TheAllegedCar Trabbi]].), such as those in UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco and UsefulNotes/NewOrleans, persisted more for their historical and tourism value than anything else, though UsefulNotes/{{Toronto}}'s is retained for its transportation value to complement [[UsefulNotes/TorontoSubway the city's ten-new subway system]]. When cities ''did'' invest in mass transit, it would often be in the form of buses and subways that wouldn't threaten the flow of automobile traffic on the streets. In TheNineties and the TurnOfTheMillennium, however, the green movement and later on fears over rising gas prices led several cities to build or expand tram lines or "light rail" systems, which are essentially streetcars with decades worth of new technology, but also their alleged "flaws" have become their biggest assets, including bigger vehicles compared to buses (making for more capacity), their above ground running (eliminating some of the problems of dark muggy subway stations), their stable fixed routes (leading to measurably higher investment along routes/stations than bus service) and their overhead electric traction, more efficient than gas or third rails (all the rage in the era of renewable energy).

** Streetcars (or Trams for the British). After UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, a combination of cheap gas and the growing popularity of buses (and, according to {{conspiracy theorist}}s, some [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_streetcar_scandal underhanded tactics]] by the auto industry) led to many streetcar lines falling out of use and eventually being dismantled. The few surviving ones in the West (in East Germany and most other Warsaw Pact nations this was not the case for complex reasons, among them the [[TheAllegedCar Trabbi]].), such as those in UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco and UsefulNotes/NewOrleans, persisted more for their historical and tourism value than anything else. When cities ''did'' invest in mass transit, it would often be in the form of buses and subways that wouldn't threaten the flow of automobile traffic on the streets. In TheNineties and the TurnOfTheMillennium, however, the green movement and later on fears over rising gas prices led several cities to build or expand tram lines or "light rail" systems, which are essentially streetcars with decades worth of new technology, but also their alleged "flaws" have become their biggest assets, including bigger vehicles compared to buses (making for more capacity), their above ground running (eliminating some of the problems of dark muggy subway stations), their stable fixed routes (leading to measurably higher investment along routes/stations than bus service) and their overhead electric traction, more efficient than gas or third rails (all the rage in the era of renewable energy).

** Fear of nuclear war became widespread again with U.S. President Creator/DonaldTrump and North Korean dictator Kim-Jong Un exchanging threats throughout 2017, although this has mostly cooled off after both leaders' summit in 2018 and Trump leaving office in 2021.

* Nuclear energy seems to have undergone several cycles of popularity and lack thereof. In the 1950s, people were - by and large - excited about the "atomic age" but it took into the 1970s that commercial nuclear power really took off (and it took a ''lot'' of state or quasistate involvement of one kind or another) - aided in no small part by a certain 1973 war making clear to the entire western world that fossil fuels - and petroleum chief among them - were not infinite. However, come the mid 1980s and a certain incident on the Ukrainian / Byeolrussian border (UsefulNotes/Chernobyl) and the anti-nuclear movement had an enormous surge in popularity. While this led to some decisions to phase out nuclear energy or never enter it to begin with (of note Australia, one of the world's biggest Uranium suppliers never built a commcerical nuclear reactor for electricity generation - they do have research and isotope production reactors whose thermal output is incidental, rather than a power-source), by TheNewTens nuclear energy seemed to have recovered popularity - only for Fukushima to throw yet another wrench into all the high flying plans, culminating perhaps with the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, a major supplier of "Generation III+" reactors. However, with some DevelopmentHell stuck projects ''finally'' getting completed and China becoming the second biggest nuclear energy producer (having overtaken France by some measures tho not by others) in the 2020s and with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 leading to yet another fossil fuel price shock - and a fundamental re-evaluation of the "cheap natural gas" paradigm - numerous countries announced ambitious new building projects for nuclear power and/or the reversal of their prior abandonment of nuclear power - buoyed, in many cases, by rising support for nuclear power in the polls. It thus ''might'' appear that - especially in light of the whole Climate issue becoming more and more pressing - nuclear is on the upswing once more, but it should be obvious by now that there have been ''many'' false springs for nuclear in the past.

Then came the "retail apocalypse" of 2016-19, where a disproportionately large number of popular mall stores went through large amounts of closings or gone out of business entirely, including major department store chain The Bon-Ton. Combined with frequent store closings from the three major department store chains (J.C. Penney, Macy's, and Sears), creating further holes to be filled in malls countrywide (although discount-oriented department stores, such as Kohl's, Burlington, and Marshalls/TJ Maxx, have thrived). At the same time, younger people tended to hang out on social media instead of in malls. Despite these closures, many malls have worked around this by introducing more big-box stores; entertainment complexes (high-end theaters, bowling alleys, large-format arcades such as Dave & Buster's); unconventional tenants such as libraries, storefront churches, playplaces, or secondhand shops; or even non-retail use (one notable example being Fairlane Town Center in Dearborn, Michigan, which replaced a long-vacant department store with Ford offices). Even as the retail scene shifts, it appears that the American mall still has some life left in it.

* Creator/AdamWest. In the late 1960s, he was a primetime TV star and the actor charged with bringing Series/Batman1966 back to life after being crippled by UsefulNotes/TheComicsCode. Head to the '80s and the return of the [[UsefulNotes/TheDarkAgeOfComicBooks Dark Knight]], and West is a ''persona non grata'', firmly stuck as a reminder of the DorkAge Batman. This is lampshaded in an episode of ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'', in which a character based on and voiced by West is portrayed as a washed-up has-been matinee idol remembered only by hardcore fans. But toward the end of his life, he was a staple voice actor in comedies such as ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'' [[AdamWesting precisely because of his history as Batman]] and trademark [[LargeHam overdramatic voice]]. Adam West's particular incarnation of Batman has enjoyed repopularization via the light-hearted ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold'' and the comic book ''ComicBook/Batman66'', as well as a general reappraisal of the 60s series itself, with it being appreciated for the AffectionateParody that it is. All this led to West's death in 2017 causing much more public sadness than it likely would have a decade previously.

* Throughout the last decades of the 20th century and especially after the start of the 21st, over-the-air (OTA) television and the traditional TV antennas used to receive it fell out of fashion in favor of cable and satellite TV, which offered a larger variety of programming and was less encumbered by content restrictions. It got to the point where the most popular and talked-about TV shows were on cable stations, not major networks, and many newly built or renovated homes forwent the installation of TV antennas. In TheNewTens, however, public opinion, especially that of younger audiences, began to sour on cable services, seeing them as obsolete and cumbersome services since they force you to pay exorbitant amounts of for hundreds or thousands of channels even if you only watch a handful of them, comparing them unfavorably to newer Internet streaming services such as Creator/{{Netflix}}. Many of these people, or cord-cutters as they came to be known, supplement online streaming services with OTA TV in order to watch programming that can't be found easily online, such as local news and sports, sparking a revival of interest in the service, especially after the transition to digital offered "digital subchannels" and greater clarity due to the lack of signal compression on cable or satellite, as well as a lack of snow that you'd see on analog channels. While OTA TV may never return to being the dominant way of watching television like it was in the early days of TV, it is far from going extinct as many predicted.

* After the fall of the Iron Curtain, socialism was considered as good as dead in the United States. After the 2007-08 financial crisis, people started to think that perhaps equitable distribution of resources might be a good idea. As seen in the Occupy movement, socialism is coming back as a viable political theory (although the word remains a taboo in mainstream US politics). Socialism hasn't had a chance in U.S. electoral politics at anything beyond the state level (and for that matter only in the smaller states, most notably Vermont) since the 1920s and 30s, partly because of the "first red scare" that followed WWI and that the New Deal was thought to turn socialism obsolete. But it was the early 1950s' RedScare that killed off American socialism, especially once the "Red hunters" were able to (ironically) stir up working-class resentment against "left-wing intellectuals", giving us the current BourgeoisBohemian trope. Liberalism has since made a comeback, of course, but it is a bourgeois, ''cultural'' liberalism that most old-school socialists find obscene. Of course this all came to head in the 2016 Democratic primary when Bernie Sanders, an openly-declared socialist from Vermont did way better than expected, and in 2018 the also openly socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez surprisingly won a Democratic primary in New York and got elected to the House of Representatives. However, socialism has not been as strong among mainstream Democrats, who generally favor politically moderate candidates such as UsefulNotes/BarackObama, UsefulNotes/HillaryClinton, and UsefulNotes/JoeBiden.
** Meanwhile in the UK, socialism never became much of a dirty word, as British socialism was vehemently anti-Marxist (being closer to "utopian socialism" than to "scientific socialism"), however by the second half of the 20th century it declined as a powerful political force, "arthritically limping into the computer age", increasingly stuck in the industrial era. The Labour Party, originally a full-blown socialist party, had moved to the right under UsefulNotes/TonyBlair's leadership during the 1990s as socialism had become something of a joke, the domain of old lefties stuck in the 1970s, the days of Tony (Wedgwood) Benn, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock. After major defeats at the 2010 and 2015 general elections, the party leadership election was won by one of those 'old lefties', long-time socialist campaigner UsefulNotes/JeremyCorbyn. While hugely popular amongst the party membership, the party's Members of Parliament looked on in horror, convinced it meant electoral oblivion. Their vote of no-confidence and leadership challenge failed to remove Corbyn, and meanwhile the British press carried daily attacks on him [[note]]Ranging from 'he's a terrorist sympathiser' to [[NotMakingThisUpDisclaimer 'he didn't bow the exact number of degrees necessary to show respect at a Remembrance event']][[/note]] to a level unprecedented even for the British Tabloids, and when Prime Minister UsefulNotes/TheresaMay called a snap election in Spring 2017, many predicted, or were even certain of, a Conservative landslide. Some even questioned whether the Labour Party could survive as a political force. In an unprecedented turnaround, however, Corbyn's socialist policies, including re-nationalisation (something that had been off the table for decades), proved remarkably popular after years of Conservative-led austerity and the fallout from Brexit, especially amongst younger voters. Although the Conservatives remained the largest party in the subsequent election, they lost their majority in parliament and Labour made substantial gains [[note]]Including seats such as Canterbury and even Kensington, places that have never been anything other than Conservative[[/note]] and received their best result in years[[note]]Even taking a brief lead in the polls after the election[[/note]]. For the time being, at least, old-school socialism is enjoying a come-back.

* Americans were huge consumers of tea until the [[UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution Boston Tea Party]], when coffee became the beverage of choice and tea became synonymous with "sissified" Brits. During the 2010s however, tea became increasingly popular in North America, mostly because of the craze over British culture during the early years of the decade and growing aversion to caffeine, especially among younger demographics (which has meant a shift in coffee consumption towards more "gourmet" experiences like Starbucks and Nespresso; its place as the quintessential pick-me-up taken over by energy drinks and some varieties of tea). At the same time, green tea became popular as a health food, particularly among women. As a result, better quality teas became more readily available and big box stores began stocking electric kettles (though generally less powerful than the average U.K. models) in their kitchen appliance sections.

* After [[TheGreatPoliticsMessUp the fall of the Iron Curtain]], socialism was considered as good as dead in the United States. After the 2007-08 financial crisis, people started to think that perhaps equitable distribution of resources might be a good idea. As seen in the Occupy movement, socialism is coming back as a viable political theory (although the word remains a taboo in mainstream US politics). Socialism hasn't had a chance in U.S. electoral politics at anything beyond the state level (and for that matter only in the smaller states, most notably Vermont) since the 1920s and 30s, partly because of the "first red scare" that followed WWI and that the New Deal was thought to turn socialism obsolete. But it was the early 1950s' RedScare that killed off American socialism, especially once the "Red hunters" were able to (ironically) stir up working-class resentment against "left-wing intellectuals", giving us the current BourgeoisBohemian trope. Liberalism has since made a comeback, of course, but it is a bourgeois, ''cultural'' liberalism that most old-school socialists find obscene. Of course this all came to head in the 2016 Democratic primary when Bernie Sanders, an openly-declared socialist from Vermont did way better than expected, and in 2018 the also openly socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez surprisingly won a Democratic primary in New York and got elected to the House of Representatives. However, socialism has not been as strong among mainstream Democrats, who generally favor politically moderate candidates such as UsefulNotes/BarackObama, UsefulNotes/HillaryClinton, and UsefulNotes/JoeBiden.